Silver linings for the US

It's time to look at the finer details of the worldwide box-office figures for 2012, recently issued by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The first talking point is what – despite all the marvelling at explosive overseas growth – a resounding year for US domestic it was: it grew for the first time in four years, by 6%, from $10.2bn to $10.8bn.

The MPAA report takes the cheerleading line, claiming that the ticket price increases weren't responsible because they have remained flat (not quite true: there's been a three-cent jump) and emphasising a 6% increase in cinema admissions from 1.28bn to 1.36bn (still well below the 1.57bn post-TV era high-water mark in 2002). But the results are undoubtedly a tonic, proof that life still exists in a market that looked to have reached saturation point. At the top of the yearly chart, three staunchly American films – Avengers Assemble, The Dark Knight Rises and The Hunger Games – won the battle for hearts (minds is possibly a stretch too far) on home soil; they notched up higher-than-average figures, even for top titles. This US resurgence ensured the overseas proportion of the worldwide box-office total stayed static (69% of $34.7bn).

Another Bric in the wall

But of course overseas box office continued to expand in 2012, as it has for the last two decades. Just more unevenly than usual. Asia-Pacific saw stupendous 15% growth to reach $10.4bn, fuelled by another running jump – 36% – at the Chinese box office. So it came as confirmation of the cinema world's worst-kept secret that China finally passed Japan to become the largest market outside the US, worth $2.7bn (though Japan, another long-established, saturated territory, did post some small growth, too). I'm still sceptical, though, about Ernst & Young's widely quoted prediction that China will pass the US completely by 2020: that would mean extraordinary growth figures sustained over nearly a decade.

One thing beyond dispute is that Asia-Pacific is poised to overtake the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East and Africa), which shrank slightly last year to $10.7bn, very soon. The reason for the backslide is not immediately obvious, something not helped by the poor availability of precise African figures. But Italy, Spain and France all saw falls in the European heartlands: is it possible the Eurozone crisis is having an effect on box office? Germany and the UK – enjoying its Skyfall rush – stayed level with last year's showings. The third region used by the MPAA for global box-office purposes – Latin America – logged a small rise, from $2.6bn to $2.8bn. Interestingly, Brazil creeps in at No 10 on the lineup of the largest overseas markets – perhaps a sign that a long underperforming territory, which has a poor cinema infrastructure for such a large and illustrious country, is beginning to stir. Now all the Bric countries being circled by the studios as future profit-motors are represented on the list.

Render unto Tinseltown

The MPAA report is still, sadly, low on detail on overseas activity, despite abroad being where Hollywood's compass points these days. It certainly doesn't broach the touchy question – loaded with the old cultural-imperialism chestnut – of exactly what level of dominance Hollywood enjoys worldwide. So, using Metacritic's figures for respective studios' takings in 2012, I've done some calculations of my own. If worldwide box office was $34.7bn, and the six majors' combined box office was $21.773bn, that means American cinema enjoyed a minimum 62.7% share of the globe (this doesn't take into account films by smaller producers, including Lions Gate, which is virtually a proper studio now). Applying the same methods for the previous three years, the percentage comes out as: 2009, 63.9%; 2010, 67.4%; 2011, 66.9%; 2012, 62.7%.

Does this four-year snapshot mean anything? It certainly reinforces that the US remains the 900lb gorilla of world cinema – gripping what, if complete stats were available, would probably be closer to 70+% of all box-office receipts. But Kim Jong-un and devotees of cultural diversity can also comfort themselves with the fact that this share seems to be dropping – from a 2010 peak when Avatar skewed the spread – at a time when overseas markets are expanding rapidly and the studios are straining to devise "global content". And the drop was a fairly dramatic one in 2012, despite a fair performance across the board from the big six (four made it over the $2bn mark in international markets), and a year that contained a No 3 entry for Disney, Avengers Assemble, on the all-time list. So this shows why the MPAA flapped so hard about the Chinese government's anti-competitive practices – forcing US blockbusters to run off against each other on the same weekend, and blackout periods for foreign releases. As new cinema markets become larger and more sophisticated Hollywood will have to fight harder to retain the status quo.

•Next week's After Hollywood will examine cinema's most celebrated political office. What global cinematic stories would you like to see covered in the column? Let us know in the comments below.